Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2001-12-17- 12:18 a.m.

Another Metaphor About Girls And Drugs

I hate to say it, but the common thrills of being a guy are starting to be a bit less effective. There are a few simple thrills that you occasionally get just as a fringe benefit of having a Y chromosome. You know, things that they threw in along with the price of membership to make it a tad more appealing to impulse shoppers. And one of those is really supposed to be the high you get when you just got a girl’s phone number.
I suppose that like any high, the effects get harder to get over repeated use. Because to be honest, that first hit was like any other. I’ll try harder to explain what I mean later, but that very first time you are scared as hell. You are probably going for a pretty low-risk bet, taking a horse where the odds are 3-2, but nonetheless, you can’t quite believe that you have the guts to do it. And when it works, you are relieved as hell.
The next few times, you probably are still hunting small game, but after a while, you have the guts to go after something big. Someone who you know is out of your league, but you take a shot at it anyway. For a lot of guys, this is a defining moment. If you get shot down this first big shot, you may never recover. I know guys like this; guys who went after the brass ring and got shot down hard, so hard that they never really dared to go after the person that they really wanted again. You see guys like that all the time; out in bars they hang in packs, always checking the room for action and never saying a word to a girl that they don’t already know.
Of course, if they are too successful hunting big game right out of the gate they never recover either. They become those guys who are always on the make; the sort of guys that you hate having as one of your friends because you’ve been out with them three or four times and you realize that you function as a sort of prop, like some guys will get a dog just to walk them and have girls stop to talk about how adorable their dog is. And you end up talking to some girl’s friends for the rest of the night, uncomfortably having a discussion about the early works of Kandinsky, or the important work that NYPIRG is doing for the Long Island Watershed, or whatever it is that she is doing that she needs to enlighten you about. Any of you out there ever been asked to “take one for the team”? Then you already know what I mean.
I fall into the category that most of my friends do, and that I naturally think is the best of the three. I have had my share of both victory and defeat, so I am not too scared to go talk to a girl, but not so fearless that I do it once a weekend. And therefore, I am rather dependent on the thrill of going up to a girl and getting her phone number. I mean, there are few pleasures attached to being a single guy. And since I don’t fall into the category where I am getting laid with a different girl every Saturday, this is a big deal for me. If I was close enough to my folks where I could talk to them about stuff like this, it should be worth writing home about. Not a whole letter, but maybe a quick note in between questions about how they are doing and excuses of why I need them to send more money.
But it isn’t. I feel as though I am doing this by rote; following a schedule of events, a pre-planned series of actions. I hate to say it, but at this point in my life, I can say with a sense of surety that I have done all of this before, and that I have a pretty good sense of all the ways that this might work out. And I even know that this girl could be the one; I could fall madly in love and spend the rest of my life with this person. And everything could be great, and special, and I could live pretty much happily ever after. Sure, it hasn’t ever been exactly like that before, I admit. But I know how it feels to want that, and expect that. I know how it feels when I wake up next to someone and look at her sleeping and to feel like the luckiest person in the world because I am going to get to do this every morning for the rest of my life. And I know how clichéd that sounds, how stupid and simplistic and out of some shit movie where Meg Ryan goes around with a bunch of guys who don’t seem to realize that they are dating Meg Ryan. But I did feel that way, and shut up, probably so have you.
And that is how you are supposed to feel, and you are supposed to want that, and I do. Goddamn it, I do. I want to meet a new girl that I like, and get her number. I want to take her out, and spend too much money, and have that first tentative kiss. And I want to feel that possibility on the tip of my life, and feel the excitement of when you know but you still aren’t sure enough to say it yet. I want to wake up in some girl’s parents’ house on Christmas morning and get up and see the look on her Grandmother’s face when she sees what we got her. And I expect that the prospect of it all should excite me a bit.
Supposedly, dogs and cats can sense that an earthquake is coming. Something about their equilibrium goes a bit off, and they can feel themselves reacting in a different way to things, and they know that trouble is coming.
I should have seen it coming.

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If you want to make me
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Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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